The impact of parents' health shocks on children's health behaviors

I evaluate whether parents’ health shocks in early childhood, adolescence, or adulthood impact their children’s risky health behavior. I use a French epidemiological cohort. Two types of health shocks are considered: lung cancer and smoking-related cancer. First, I exploit heterogeneity in the age of the individual at the moment of the parent’s health shock to analyze the influence of the cancer diagnosis on the offspring's smoking behavior. Second, I propose a Cox proportional hazards model to study the impact of the age of the offspring at the date of the diagnosis on the probability of quitting smoking. Finally, I use the individual's smoking history to build a retrospective panel and estimate an individual fixed-effects model to identify the impact of the parent’s diagnosis on the probability of smoking. In line with the existing literature, I find in all cases very limited impact of the parent’s health shock on the offspring's behavior.